Notre vie est du vent tissu. JOUBERT.
Alles Vergängliche Ist nur ein Gleichniss. GOËTHE.
Stratification of caste.
IN India, as in the greater part of the East, religion is still a power for good or for evil, and has over the minds of men an empire which in modern Europe has long passed out of its hands. Assisted by the kindred agency of fiction, it exercises a subtle influence on family ritual and domestic usage, and through these tends insensibly to modify and transform the internal structure of Indian society. At the risk of driving patient analogy too hard, we may perhaps venture to compare the social gradations of the Indian caste system to a series of geological deposits. The successive strata in each series occupy a definite position, determined by the manner of their formation, and the varying customs in the one may be said to represent the fossils in the other. The lowest castes preserve the most primitive usages, just as the oldest geological formations contain the simplest forms of organic life. Thus the totems or animal-names by which the animistic races regulate their matrimonial arrangements, give place, as we travel upwards in the social scale, to group-names based upon local and territorial distinctions, while in the highest castes kinship is reckoned by descent from personages closely resembling the eponymous heroes of early Greek tradition. Even the destructive agencies, to which the imperfection of the geological record is attributed, have their parallel in the transforming influences by which the two great religions of modern India, Hinduism and Islam, have modified the social order. A curious contrast may be discerned in their methods of working and in the results which they produce.
Hinduism and Islam.
Islam is a force of the volcanic sort, a burning and integrating force, which, under favourable conditions, may even make a nation. It melts and fuses together a whole series of tribes, and reduces their internal structure to one uniform pattern, in which no survivals of pre-existing usages can be detected. The separate strata disappear; their characteristic fossils are crushed out of recognition; and a solid mass of law and tradition occupies their place. Hinduism, transfused as it is by mysticism and ecstatic devotion, and resting ultimately on the esoteric teachings of transcendental philosophy, knows nothing of open proselytism or forcible conversion, and attains its ends in a different and more subtle fashion, for which no precise analogue can be found in the physical world. It leaves existing aggregates very much as they were, and so far from welding them together, after the manner of Islam, into larger cohesive aggregates, tends rather to create an indefinite number of fresh groups; but every tribe that passes within the charmed circle of Hinduism inclines sooner or later to abandon its more primitive usages or to clothe them in some Brahmanical disguise. The strata, indeed, remain, or are multiplied; their relative positions are, on the whole, unaltered; only their fossils are metamorphosed into more advanced forms. One by one the ancient totems drop off, or are converted by a variety of ingenious devices into respectable personages of the standard mythology; the fetish gets a new name, and is promoted to the Hindu Pantheon in the guise of a special incarnation of one of the greater gods; the tribal chief sets up a family priest, starts a more or less romantic family legend, and in course of time blossoms forth as a new variety of Rajput. His people follow his lead, and make haste to sacrifice their women at the shrine of social distinction. Infant-marriage with all its attendant horrors is introduced; widows are forbidden to marry again; and divorce, which plays a great, and on the whole, a useful part in tribal society, is summarily abolished. Throughout all these changes, which strike deep into the domestic life of the people, the fiction is maintained that no real change has taken place, and every one believes, or affects to believe, that things are with them as they have been since the beginning of time.
Railways and religion.
It is curious to observe that the operation of these tendencies has been quickened, and the sphere of their actionenlarged, by the great extension of railways which has taken place in India during the last few years. Both Benares and Manchester have been brought nearer to their customers, and have profited by the increased demand for their characteristic wares. Siva and Krishna drive out the tribal gods as surely as grey shirtings displace the less elegant but more durable hand-woven cloth. Pilgrimages become more pleasant and more popular, and the touts, who sally forth from the great religious centres to promote these pious excursions, find their task easier and their clients more open to persuasion than was the case even twenty years ago. A trip to Jagannāth or Gaya is no longer the formidable and costly undertaking that it was. The Hindu peasant who is pressed to kiss the footprints of Vishnu, or to taste the hallowed rice that has been offered to the Lord of the World, may now reckon the journey by days instead of months. He need no longer sacrifice the savings of a lifetime to his pious object, and he has a reasonable prospect of returning home none the worse for a week’s indulgence in religious enthusiasm. Even the distant Mecca has been brought, by means of competing lines of steamers, within the reach of the faithful in India; and the influence of Muhammadan missionaries and returned pilgrims has made itself felt in a quiet but steady revival of orthodox usage all over the country.
Rapidly as these levelling and centralizing forces do their work, a considerable residue of really primitive usage still resists their transforming influence. The oldest of the religions recorded in the last Census, if indeed it can be called a religion at all, is the medley of heterogeneous and uncomfortable superstitions now known by the not entirely appropriate name of Animism. The difficulty of defining this mixed assortment of primitive ideas is illustrated by the fact that there is no name for it in any of the Indian languages. For Census purposes, therefore, recourse must be had to the clumsy device of instructing the enumerators that in the case of tribes who are neither Hindus nor Muhammadans, but have no word for their religious beliefs, the name of the tribe itself must be entered in the column for religion. Thus one and the same religion figures in the original returns of the Census under as many different designations as there are tribes professing it. On turning to the European literature of the subject we find that even among scientific observers the curiously indeterminate character of the beliefs in question has given rise to considerable diversity of nomenclature. Three different names, each dwelling on a different aspect of the subject, have obtained general acceptance, and an attempt has been made to introduce a fourth which seeks to accentuate characteristics overlooked by the rest.
Fetishism,
The earliest and best-known name, Fetishism, was first brought into prominence by Charles de Brosses, President of the Parliament of Burgundy, who published in 1760 a book called Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches, ou Parallèle de l’ancienne Religion de l’Egypte avec la Religion actuelle de la Nigritie. De Brosses was a man of very various learning. He ranked high in his day among the historians of the Roman Republic; he wrote a scientific treatise on the origin of language; he is recognized as one of the founders of the modern school of anthropological mythology; and he is believed to have invented the names Australia and Polynesia. He did not, however, invent, nor was he even the first to use, the word fetish, which is a variant of the Portuguese fetiço or fetisso, an amulet or talisman, derived from the Latin factitius, “artificial,” “unnatural,” and hence “magical.” It was employed, naturally enough, by the Portuguese navigators of the sixteenth century to describe the worship of stocks and stones, charms, and a variety of queer and unsavoury objects, which struck them as the chief feature of the religion of the negroes of the Gold Coast. Nor did de Brosses travel so far on the path of generalization as some of his followers. He assumed indeed that Fetishism was the beginning of all religion, since no lower form could be conceived; but he did not extend its domain like Bastholm, who in 1805 claimed as fetishes “everything produced by nature or art which receives divine honour, including sun, moon, earth, air, fire, water, mountains, rivers, trees, stones, images, and animals if considered as objects of divine worship.”
For some five and twenty years after Bastholm wrote, the term Fetishism lay buried in the special literature of anthropology, whence it seems to have been unearthed by Auguste Comte, who used it, in connexion with his famous loi des trois états, as a general name for all the forms of primitive religion which precede and insensibly pass into polytheism. Comte described the mental attitude of early man towards religion as “pure fetishism, constantly characterized by the free and direct exercise of our primitive tendency to conceive all external bodies whatsoever, natural or artificial, as animated by a life essentially analogous to our own, with mere differences of intensity.”* His authority, combined with the natural attractions of a cleanly cut definition, gave wide currency to this extended sense of the word, and it is only of late years that it has been confined to the particular class of superstitions to which the Portuguese explorers originally applied it. In the light of our present knowledge, Fetishism may be defined as the worship of tangible inanimate objects believed to possess in themselves some kind of mysterious power. Thus restricted, the term marks out a phase of primitive superstition for which it is convenient to have a distinctive name.
Shamanism.
We have seen how Fetishism came to us from the west coast of Africa. For the origin of Shamanism we must look to Siberia. Shaman is the title of the sorcerer-priest of the Tunguz tribe of Eastern Siberia, between the Yenisei and Lena rivers. The word has been supposed to be a variant of the Sanskrit Sramana, Pāli Samana, which appears in the Chinese sha-man or shi-man in its original sense of a Buddhist ascetic, and may have passed into the Tunguz language through the Manchu form Saman. Ethnologists seem to have been introduced to it by the writings of the German explorer and naturalist, Peter Simon Pallas, who travelled through the Tunguz country up to the borders of China in 1772, and wrote a lengthy account of his wanderings.† The essence of Shamanism is the recognition of the Shaman, medicine man, wizard, or magician, as the authorized agent by whom unseen powers can be moved to cure disease, to reveal the future, to influence the weather, to avenge a man on his enemy, and generally to intervene for good or evil in the affairs of the visible world. The conception of the character of the powers invoked varies with the culture of the people themselves. They may be gods or demons, spirits or ancestral ghosts, or their nature may be wholly obscure and shadowy. In order to place himself en rapport with them, the Shaman lives a life apart, practises or pretends to practise various austerities, wears mysterious and symbolical garments, and performs noisy incantations in which a sacred drum or enchanted rattle takes a leading part. On occasion he should be able to foam at the mouth and go into a trance or fit, during which his soul is supposed to quit his body and wander away into space. By several observers these seizures have been ascribed to epilepsy, and authorities quoted by Peschel go so far as to say that the successful Shaman selects the pupils whom he trains to succeed him from youths with an epileptic tendency. It seems possible, however, that the phenomena supposed to be epileptic may really be hypnotic. In this and other respects there is a general resemblance between the Shaman and the spiritualist medium of the present day. Both deal in much the same wares, and spiritualism is little more than modernized Shamanism. Nevertheless, though the principle of Shamanism is proved, by these and other instances, to be widely diffused and highly persistent, it does not cover the entire field of primitive superstition, and it is misleading to use the name of a part for the purpose of defining the whole. Still less can we follow Lubbock in treating Shamanism as a necessary stage in the progress of religious development, or Peschel in extending the term to the priesthoods of organized religions like Buddhism, Brahmanism, and Islam. Traces of Shamanism may have survived in all of them, as in the witchcraft occasionally met with in modern Europe; but to call their hierarchy Shamanistic is to ignore historical development and to confuse the Yogi with the Brāhman, and the Fakīr with the Mulla.
Animism.
The word Animism was first used to denote the metaphysical system of Georg Ernst Stahl, the originator of the chemical hypothesis of Phlogiston, who revived in scientific form the ancient doctrine of the identity of the vital principle and the soul. In his Theoria medica vera published at Halle in 1707, Stahl endeavoured, in opposition to Hoffman’s theory of purely mechanical causation, to trace all organic functions to the action of an inherent immaterial substance or anima. In his great work on Primitive Culture Sir E. B. Tylor, transferred the term from metaphysics, where it had had its day, to ethnology, where it has taken root and flourished, and made the idea which it conveys the basis of his exposition of the principles underlying primitive religion. “It is habitually found,” he writes, “that the theory of Animism divides into two great dogmas forming parts of one consistent doctrine; first, concerning souls of individual creatures, capable of continued existence after the death or destruction of the body; second, concerning other spirits, upward to the rank of powerful deities. Spiritual beings are held to affect or control the events of the material world, and man’s life here and hereafter; and it being considered that they hold intercourse with men, and receive pleasure or displeasure from human actions, the belief in their existence leads naturally, and it might also be said inevitably, sooner or later to active reverence and propitiation. Thus Animism, in its full development, includes the belief in souls and in a future state, in controlling deities and subordinate spirits, these doctrines practically resulting in some kind of active worship.”
The best term available.
Here for the first time we are presented with a name derived from careful comparison and analysis of a large body of facts, and purporting to express the central and dominant idea underlying primitive religion. The advance on the earlier terminology is immense. We have passed from the superficial to the essential, from the casual impressions of traders and travellers to the mature conclusions of a skilled observer. Although the term has not escaped criticism, it covers, if not the whole field, at any rate a large and conspicuous part of it; it has gained universal currency and is unlikely to be displaced.
It is indeed almost inconceivable that any name should be devised which would embody a precise conception of the confused bundle of notions wrapped up in savage religion; and most reasonable people will feel that haggling over terminology is a thankless and futile form of intellectual exercise.
Ideas underlying Animism.
While I entirely accept Animism, as the best name that we are likely to get, some objections to which it is liable may perhaps be mentioned. In the first place, it connotes, or seems to connote, the idea that gods are merely the ghosts or shadows of men, projected in superhuman proportions, like the spectre of the Brocken, on the misty background of the unknown, but still in their inception nothing but common ghosts. Definitions, of course, cannot be judged merely by etymology, but a name which appears to beg a controverted question is pro tanto not a good name. Moreover, this particular name, failing the explanations necessary to bring out its limitations, seems to have done some real dis-service to science, and that in a branch of investigation where a name counts for a great deal. One may almost say of Animism that it has given rise to a new bias, the anthropological bias. The theological or missionary bias we know, and are prepared to discount. It leads those who are possessed by it to regard all alien gods, in one case as devils, and in another as degenerate survivals of an original revelation or intuition. But the tutored anthropologist is worse than the untutored missionary. He knows the game only too well; he sees what his theory of origins allows him to see, and he unconsciously shapes the evidence in the collecting so as to fit the theory with which Mr. Tylor has set him up. Secondly, it admits of being confused with the idea, common to savages and children, that all things are animated; a notion not easy to reconcile with the ghost theory of religion, which is based on the assumption that primitive man was profoundly impressed by the difference between the dead and the living and evolved therefrom the conception of spirit. Thirdly, the name leaves out of account, or at any rate inadequately expresses, what may be called the impersonal element in early religion, an element which seems to me to have been rather overlooked. In touching on this point I am reluctant to add yet another conjecture to a literature already so prolific in more or less ingenious guesses. But I have had the good fortune, while settling a series of burning disputes about land, to have been brought into very intimate relations with some of the strongest and most typical Animistic races in India, and thus to have enjoyed some special opportunities of studying Animism in those forest solitudes which are its natural home. More especially in Chutia Nāgpur, where this religion still survives in its pristine vigour, my endeavours to find out what the jungle people really do believe have led me to the negative conclusion that in most cases the indefinite something which they fear and attempt to propitiate is not a person at all in any sense of the word. If one must state the case in positive terms, I should say that the idea which lies at the root of their religion is that of power, or rather of many powers. What the Animist worships, and seeks in strange ways to influence and conciliate, is the shifting and shadowy company of unknown powers or tendencies making for evil rather than for good, which reside in the primeval forest, in the crumbling hills, in the rushing river, in the spreading tree, which gives its spring to the tiger, its venom to the snake, which generates jungle fever, and walks abroad in the terrible guise of cholera, small-pox, or murrain. Closer than this he does not seek to define the object to which he offers his victim, or whose symbol he daubs with vermilion at the appointed season. Some sort of power is there, and that is enough for him. Whether it is associated with a spirit or an ancestral ghost, whether it proceeds from the mysterious thing itself, whether it is one power or many, he does not stop to enquire. I remember a huge Sāl tree (Shorea robusta) in a village not far from my head-quarters, which was the abode of a nameless something of which the people were mightily afraid. My business took me frequently to the village, and I made many endeavours to ascertain what the something was. There was no reluctance to talk about it, but I could never get it defined as a god, a demon, or a ghost. Eventually an Anglicised Hindu pleader from another district took a speculative lease of the village, and proceeded to enhance the rents and exploit it generally. One of the first things he did was to assert himself by cutting down the haunted tree. Strange as it may seem, no one was in the least alarmed at this sacrilegious act. The Hindu, they said, was a foreigner, so nothing could happen to him, while the villagers were blameless, for they had not touched the tree. What was supposed to have become of its mysterious occupant I never could ascertain. The instance is typical of the Animistic point of view, and has numberless parallels. All over Chutia Nāgpur there are many jungle-clad hills, the favourite haunts of bears, which beaters of the Animistic races steadfastly refuse to approach until the mysterious power which pervades them has been conciliated by the sacrifice of a fowl. Everywhere we find sacred groves, the abode of equally indeterminate beings, who are represented by no symbols and of whose form and functions no one can give an intelligible account. They have not yet been clothed with individual attributes; they linger on as survivals of the impersonal stage of early religion.
Impersonal elemental forces.
If we assume for the moment the possibility that some such conception, essentially impersonal in its character and less definite than the idea of a spirit, may have formed the germ of primitive religion, one can see how easily it may have escaped observation. The languages of wild people are usually ill-equipped with abstract terms, and even if they had a name for so vague and inchoate a notion, it would certainly have to be translated into the religious vocabulary of their anthropomorphic neighbours. A Santāl could only explain Marang Buru, “the great mountain,” by saying that it was a sort of Deo or god. A Mech or Dhimāl could give no other account of the reverence with which he regards the Tista river, a frame of mind amply justified by the destructive vagaries of its snow-fed current. On the same principle a writer * of the 17th century says of the West African natives that “when they talk to whites, they call their idolatry Fitisiken, I believe because the Portuguese called sorcery fitiso.” In Melanesia, according to Dr. Codrington, “plenty devil” is the standard formula for describing a sacred place, and the Fiji word for devil has become the common appellation of the native ghosts or spirits. So it is with the Animistic races of India. If they are questioned about their religion, they can only reply in terms of another religion, in Sanskrit derivatives which belong to a wholly different order of ideas. And when we find in Melanesia the very people who put off the inquisitive foreigner with the comprehensive word devil, still retaining the belief in incorporeal beings with neither name nor shape, round whom no myths have gathered, who are not and never have been human, who control rain and sunshine and are kindly disposed towards men, one is tempted to conjecture that the same sort of belief would be found in India by any one who could adequately probe the inner consciousness of the Animistic races.
Origin of unworshipped supreme beings.
The hypothesis that the earliest beginnings of savage religion are to be sought in the recognition of elemental forces to which, in the first instance, no personal qualities are ascribed, may perhaps afford an explanation of a problem which has exercised several enquirers of late—the origin of the faineant unwor-shipped Supreme Beings who figure in savage mythology almost all over the world. The existence of such personages does not fit in with some current theories of the origin of religion, nor are the facts readily explained away. Sir E. B. Tylor believes these beings to have been borrowed from missionary teaching; Mr. Andrew Lang holds that they “came, in some way only to be guessed at,” first in order of evolution, and mentions, as “not the most unsatisfactory” solution of the problem, the hypothesis of St. Paul (Rom. i. 19). “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God hath showed it unto them.” We find distinct traces of them in Indian Animism, but in India no one has been at the trouble of speculating about their origin. Now, if man began merely by believing in undefined powers which he attempted to control by means of magic, is it not conceivable that the powers whose activity was uniformly beneficial should, as time went on, receive less attention than those which on occasion were capable of doing mischief? When natural conservatism has to some extent spent its force, magicians and their clients must by degrees perceive, or must by accident discover, that the rising of the sun is in no way dependent upon the imitative magical rites designed to secure its recurrence, and these functions accordingly fall into disuse. When the monsoon current is fairly regular, the powers of the air tend to share the same fate, though the women of the tribe still preserve and occasionally practise the magic art of rain-making, stripping themselves naked at night and dragging a plough through the parched fields, as the Kocih women do this day in Rangpur. But he would be a bold man who would venture to neglect the destructive powers of nature, the diseases which strike without warning, and the various chances of sudden and accidental death. When the era of anthropomorphism sets in, and personal gods come into fashion, the active and passive powers of the earlier system are clothed in appropriate attributes. The former become departmental spirits or gods, with shrines and temples of their own, and incessant offerings from apprehensive votaries. The latter receive sparing and infrequent worship, but are recognized, en revanche, as beings of a higher type, fathers and well-wishers of mankind, patrons of primitive ethics, maker of things who have done their work and earned their repose. The Santāl Marang Buru represents the one; the Bongās or godlings of disease are examples of the other. With the transformation of impersonal powers into personal gods, magic too changes its character. The materialistic processes which consist of imitating the outward and visible effects of natural forces give place to spells, incantations, and penances which are supposed to compel the gods to obey the commands of the magician. In course of time magic itself is ousted by religion, and banished to those holes and corners of popular superstition where it still survives in varying degrees of strength.*
Beginnings of Relihion.
The theory carries us still further. It endeavours to account, by the operation of known processes of thought, not merely for what Mr. Lang calls “the high gods of low races,” but also for the entire congeries of notions from which the beginnings of religion have gradually emerged. It supposes that early man’s first contact with his surroundings gave him the idea of a number of influences, powers, tendencies, forces, outside and other than himself, which affected him in various ways. His dealings with these were at first determined by the rudimentary principle of association, common to men and other animals, that like causes like. In that early stage of his mental development the primitive philosopher did not impute personal attributes of any kind to the something not himself which made for his comfort or the reverse; nor did he suppose that the effects which the various somethings produced were brought about by the action of any individual even remotely resembling himself. Had he entertained any such idea, it is difficult to see how magic could ever have come into existence, still less how it could have preceded the development of what we call religion. For the essence of magic is compulsion. Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo. If certain operations are accurately gone though, certain results are bound to follow, as a mere sequence of effect and cause. The earliest type of such processes is what is called imitative magic, because it imitates the phenomena which it seeks to produce. Or, to put the case in another way, it attempts to set a cause in motion by mimicking its consequences. Fires are lighted to make the sun PEOPLE OF INDIA shine in season; water is sprinkled in a shower of drops with the object of inducing rain. In either case the operation is of a quasi-scientific character, and the operator endeavours to control a natural force by imitating its manifestations on a small scale. His mental attitude is so far removed from our own that it would be futile to attempt to analyse it, but it seems to involve the same kind of instinctive or semi-conscious association of ideas, of which instances may be observed among intelligent animals such as monkeys and dogs.
The ghost theory.
On the other hand, if “in the beginning at least,” as Mr. Grant Allen * affirms, " every god was nothing but an exceptionally powerful and friendly ghost—a ghost able to help, and from whose help great things may reasonably be expected," one can only wonder how people who desired to enlist his sympathy could have ventured to approach him in ways so inappropriate and disrespectful as those associated with magic. The greater the ghost, the more striking is the incongruity of the ritual. Take the case of a strong chief like the Zulu Chaka, who exercised the most absolute power in the most arbitrary fashion, and loomed so large in the consciousness of the tribe that he seemed to them none other than a god—how could they imagine that he who in life was so strong and so relentless should after death be at the beck and call of any medicine man who could mumble a formula correctly? Surely, apotheosis can never have involved degradation. If there is any force in this line of argument, it leads us to the following dilemma: Either we must abandon the view that magic has everywhere preceded religion, or we must throw over the theory that every god commenced life as a magnified ghost. But there is much in modern research that tends to confirm the former opinion, and it is hardly necessary to travel beyond the Vedas for proof of its validity. Vedic ritual is full of imitative or sympathetic magic, which almost everywhere appears as a palpable survival from older modes of worship.
Growth of Ancestor-worship.
The ancestral theory, on the other hand, or at any rate that extreme form of it with which we are now concerned, is less firmly established. No one of course disputes the existence of ancestor-worship, or denies that every Pantheon has been largely recruited from men, not always of the most respectable antecedents, who have fascinated the popular imagination by their doings in life or by the tragic or pathetic fashion of their death. India can show a motley crowd of such divinities. Priests and princesses, pious ascetics and successful dacoits, Indian soldiers of fortune and British men of action, bridegrooms who met their death on their wedding day, and virgins who died unwed, jostle each other in a fantastic Walpurgis dance where new performers are constantly joining in and old ones seldom go out. How modern some of these personages are may be seen from a few illustrations. In 1884 Keshab Chandra Sen, the leader of one of the numerous divisions of the Brahmo Samāj, narrowly escaped something closely resembling deification at the hands of a section of his disciples. A revelation was said to have been received enjoining that the chair used by him during his life should be set apart and kept sacred, and the Legal Member of the Viceroy’s Council was invited to arbitrate in the matter. Sir Courtenay Ilbert discreetly refused “to deal with testimony of a kind inadmissible in a Court of Justice;” the parties to the dispute arrived at a compromise among themselves; and the apotheosis of the famous preacher remained incomplete. In Bombay a personage of a very different type has been promoted to divine honours. Sivaji, the founder of the Marātha Confederacy, has a temple and image in one of the bastions of the fort at Malvan in the Ratnagiri district and is worshipped by the Gauda caste of fishermen. This seems to be a local cult, rather imperfectly developed, as there are no priests and no regular ritual. But within the last generation smaller men have attained even wider recognition. By the aid of railways and printing, the fame of a modern deity may travel a long way. Portraits of Yashvantrāo, a subordinate revenue officer in Khandesh, who ruined himself by promiscuous almsgiving, and sacrificed his official position to his reluctance to refuse the most impossible requests, are worshipped at the present day in thousands of devout households. Far down in the south of India, I have come across cheap lithographs of a nameless Bombay ascetic, the Swāmi of Akalkot in Sholapur, who died about twenty years ago. In life the Swāmi seems to have been an irritable saint, for he is said to have pelted with stones any ill-advised person who asked questions about his name and antecedents. As he was reputed to be a Mutiny refugee, he may have had substantial reasons for guarding his incognito. He is now revered from the Deccan to Cape Comorin as Dattātreya, a sort of composite incarnation of Brahmā, Vishnu, and Siva, and has a temple and monastery of his own.
Facts such as these lead one to surmise that some students of the modern science of religion have been so impressed by the undeniable facility with which historical personages are transformed into gods that they have rather overlooked the stages by which ancestor-worship has grown up, and have assumed that its latest form was also its earliest. Now, in India at any rate, we can trace in the funeral ceremonies, both of the Hindus and the Animists, survivals of ideas which have every appearance of going back to a far older phase of the religious instinct than that which leads to the deification of famous men. In the Vedic ritual, for example, as given by Gobhila, a prominent feature is the banquet offered to the souls of the dead—a rite which is met with among primitive people all over the world. Here is no suggestion that the souls go to heaven; they abide on or under the earth near the dwellings of men, and wait for the living to supply them with food and clothes. These pia munera are offered at monthly intervals, but the motive which inspires them is plainly disclosed by the symbolical acts which accompany the offering. At the close of the ceremony the dead ancestors are bidden to depart to their ancient habitations deep under the earth; the footprints of the mourners are swept away with a branch lest the souls should track the living to their homes; every man shakes out the corners of his garments for fear an importunate spirit lurk somewhere in their folds; a stone or a clod of earth is set up to bar the soul’s return; the funeral party step over running water which spirits cannot pass, and are careful not to look behind them on their way home. For the same reason the Mangars of Nepal obstruct the road leading from the grave with a barricade of thorns, through which the soul, conceived of as a miniature man, very tender and fragile, is unable to force its way. The Kol, the Orāon, and the Bhūmij are even now in the stage which appears in Vedic ritual as a mere survival. They do not worship their ancestors, in any intelligible sense of the word. That is to say, they do not pray to them as the Vedic people did, for male offspring, length of days, abundant flocks and herds, and victory over their enemies. It is true that they appease them with food, but this they do, partly from a kindly regard for their welfare, but mainly to deter them from coming back and making themselves unpleasant. None of their gods can be shown to be deified ancestors, nor do any of them bear personal names. There is another point which deserves notice. Among all these tribes memorial stones are set up to mark the spots where the ashes of the headmen of the village have been buried. Some of these stones are rounded off at the top into the rudimentary semblance of a head. Yet the stones are not worshipped, nor are similar stones erected in honour of the powers which are worshipped. If these powers were once upon a time ancestors or chiefs of the tribe, how did they come to lose the stones which were their due? Thus the usages of both Aryans and Dravidians point to a conception of the souls of the dead as neither immortal nor divine, and as depending for their subsistence on human ministrations, which are rendered more in fear than in affection, and are coloured throughout by the desire to deter these unwelcome guests from revisiting the abodes of the living. If these are the oldest ideas on the subject, as most authorities seem to hold, are we not justified in regarding with some suspicion the theory that everywhere and among all people the first step in the evolution of religion was the transformation of the revenant into a god? At any rate, the beliefs and practices of the most vigorous of the Dravidian races, the compact tribes of Santāls, Mundās, Orāons, and Hos, seem, so far as they go, to lend some support to the hypothesis that the beginnings of religion are to be sought in the recognition of impersonal forces which men endeavour to coerce by magic; that personal gods, approached by prayer and sacrifice, are a later development; and that the deification of chiefs and ancestors is probably the latest stage of all—a stage reached, it may be, by means of the ambitious fiction which commenced by claiming certain gods as ancestors, and ended by transforming some ancestors into gods.
Animism in India.
We may now sum up the leading feature of Animism in India. It conceives of man as passing through life surrounded by a ghostly company of powers, elements, tendencies, mostly impersonal in their character, shapeless phantasms of which no image can be made and no definite idea can be formed. Some of these have departments or spheres of influence of their own: one presides over cholera, another over small-pox, and another over cattle disease; some dwell in rocks, others haunt trees, others again are associated with rivers, whirlpools, waterfalls, or with strange pools hidden in the depths of the hills. All of them require to be diligently propitiated by reason of the ills which proceed from them, and usually the land of the village provides the ways and means for this propitiation. In the Ranchi district of Chutia Nagpur there is a tenure called Bhut-Kheta, which may be interpreted Devil’s Acre, under which certain plots of land are set apart for the primitive priest whose duty it is to see that offerings are made in due season, and that the villagers are protected from the malign influences of the shadowy powers who haunt the dark places of their immediate environment. The essence of all these practices is magic. If certain things are done decently and in order, the powers of evil are rendered innocuous in a mechanical but infallible fashion. But the rites must be correctly performed, the magic formulæ must be accurately pronounced, or else the desired effect will not be produced. It is, I think, unfortunate, that at the time when Sir E. B. Tylor’s great book on Primitive Culture was written, the essential distinction between magic and religion had not been clearly defined. Had this been so, had we then known all that Sir J. G. Frazer has since told us, I venture to doubt whether the term Animism would ever have come into existence. Considerations of ritual and usage, rather than of mythologies, traditions, and cosmogonies, would have led Sir E. B. Tylor to the conclusion that the governing factor in these primitive religions is to be sought not in belief, not in any compact theory as to dreams, spirits, or souls, but in the magical practices which enter into the daily life of semi-civilized men.
Relation between Animism and popular Hindusim.
Premising then that when we speak of Animism what we really mean is that exceedingly crude form of religion in which magic is the predominant element, we may go on to consider what is the relation between Animism and popular Hinduism. Several definitions of Hinduism are contained in the literature of the subject. In his report on the Punjab Census of 1881 (para. 214), Sir Denzil Ibbetson described it as—
“A hereditary sacerdotalism with Brahmans for its Levites, the vitality of which is preserved by the social institution of caste, and which may include all shades and diversities of religion native to India, as distinct from the foreign importations of Christianity and Islam, and from the later outgrowths of Buddhism, more doubtfully of Sikhism, and still more doubtfully of Jainism.”
A few years later Babu Guru Prasad Sen said that Hinduism was “what the Hindus, or a major portion of them, in a Hindu community do.”* Sir Athelstane Baines, who was Census Commissioner in 1891, proceeded by the method of exclusion, and defined Hinduism as “the large residuum that is not Sikh, or Jain, or Buddhist, or professedly Animistic, or included in one of the foreign religions such as Islam, Mazdaism, Chris- tianity, or Hebraism.”* More recently, Sir Alfred Lyall,t the first living authority on the subject, roughly described it as “the religion of all the people who accept the Brahmanic Scriptures.” He went on to speak of it as “a tangled jungle of disorderly superstitions.” Finally, he called it “the collection of rites, worships, beliefs, traditions, and mythologies that are sanctioned by the sacred books and ordinances of the Brahmans and are propagated by Brahmanic teaching.” The general accuracy of this newest definition is beyond dispute, but I venture to doubt whether it conveys to any one without Indian experience even an approximate idea of the elements out of which popular Hinduism has been evolved, and of the con- flicting notions which it has absorbed. From this point of view Hinduism may fairly be described as Animism more or less transformed by philosophy, or, to condense the epigram still further, as magic tempered by metaphysics. The fact is that within the enormous range of beliefs and practices which are included in the term Hinduism, there are comprised entirely different sets of ideas, or, one may say, widely different con- ceptions of the world and of life. At one end, at the lower end of the series is Animism, an essentially materialistic theory of things which seeks by means of magic to ward off or to fore- stall physical disasters, which looks no further than the world of sense, and seeks to make that as tolerable as the conditions will permit. At the other end is Pantheism combined with a system of transcendental metaphysics.
Illustration of Animistic ideas.
I will give two simple illustrations of the lower set of ideas. In a small sub-divisional court, where I Illustration of used once to dispense what passed for Animistic ideas. justice in the surrounding jungles, there was tied up the railings which fenced off the presiding officer from the multitude a fragment of a tiger’s skin. When members of certain tribes, of whom the Santals were a type, came into court to give evidence, they were required to take a peculiar but most impressive oath the use of which was, I believe, entirely illegal. Holding the tiger’s skin in one hand the witness began by invoking the power of the sun and moon, and, after asseverating his intention to speak the truth, he ended up by devoting himself to be devoured by the power of the tiger in case he should tell a lie. Some of the tribes who used to swear this weird oath have now been caught up in the wide-spread net of Hinduism, and have already parted with their tribal identity. Others again, like the Santāls, are made of sterner stuff, and still preserve an independent existence as compact and vigorous tribes. But the oath deserves remembrance as a vivid presentment of the order of ideas that prevails on the very outskirts of Hinduism. The reality of these ideas and the effectiveness of the sanction which they invoke, were sufficiently attested by the manifest reluctance of a mendacious witness to touch the magic skin, and by the zeal with which the court usher insisted upon his taking a firm grasp of it. The people who swore thus in fear and trembling, and having sworn usually told the truth according to their lights, were not in the least afraid of the mere physical tiger. On the contrary, they slew him without the smallest compunction, and carried off his corpse in triumph to claim the Government reward. Their most effective weapon was a very powerful bamboo bow, trained on the tiger’s customary path, and carrying a poisoned arrow which was discharged by a string crossing the track. This string was called the Kāl dori or “thread of death.” At a short distance on either side of it were two other strings, known as dharm dori or “threads of mercy.” If these were touched, they twitched the arrow off its rest, and rendered the bow innocuous. They were set at such a height that a tiger would walk under them, while a man or a cow would be bound to run against them. If one asked how goats escaped, one was told that they were protected by certain magical spells. The point which this digression seeks to establish is that the oath sworn in court derived its sanction not from any reverence for the tiger in the flesh, nor from the fear of being eaten by him, but from the vague dread of a mysterious tiger-power or tiger-demon, the essence and archetype of all tigers, whose vengeance no man who swore falsely could hope to escape.
The Sri Panchami and Animism.
If we move a few grades further up in the social scale, we find the worship of various kinds of Fetishes which the Portuguese seamen observed in West Africa in the middle of the 15th century, still holding its own almost from the top to the bottom of Hindu society. Here, again, it is ritual rather than the theories of the books that gives the clue to the actual beliefs of the people. How tenacious these beliefs are, and in what curiously modern forms they frequently express themselves, may be gathered from the following instance, which, I believe, is now recorded for the first time. Every year when the Government of India moves from Simla to Calcutta, there go with it, as orderlies or chaprāsis, a number of cultivators from the hills round about Simla, who are employed to carry despatch boxes, and to attend upon the various grades of officials in that great bureaucracy. At the time of the spring equinox there is a festival called Sri Panchami, when it is incumbent on every religious-minded person to worship the implements or insignia of the vocation by which he lives. The soldier worships his sword; the cultivator his plough; the money-lender his ledger; the Thags had a picturesque ritual for adoring the pickaxe with which they dug the graves of their victims; and, to take the most modern instance, the operatives in the jute mills near Calcutta bow down to the Glasgow-made engines which drive their looms. Five years ago I asked one of my orderlies what worship he had done on this particular occasion, and he was good enough to give me, knowing that I was interested in the subject, a minute description of the ritual observed. The ceremony took place on the flat roof of the huge pile of buildings which is occupied by the secretariats of the Government of India. The worshippers, some thirty in number, engaged as their priest a Punjabi Brāhman, who was employed in the same capacity as themselves. They took one of the large packing cases which are used to convey office records from Simla to Calcutta, and covered its rough woodwork with plantain leaves and branches of the sacred pīpal tree. On this foundation they set up an office despatch box which served as a sort of altar; in the centre of the altar was placed a common English glass ink-pot with a screw top, and round this were arranged the various sorts of stationery in common use, pen-holders and pen-nibs, red, blue, and black pencils, pen-knives, ink erasers, foolscap and letter-paper, envelopes, postage stamps, blotting paper, sealing wax, in short, all the clerkly paraphernalia by means of which the Government of India justifies its existence. The whole was draped with abundant festoons of red tape. To the fetish thus installed each of the worshippers presented with reverential obeisance grains of rice, turmeric, spices, pepper and other fruits of the earth, together with the more substantial offering of nine copper pice or farthings—"numero deus impare gaudet"—the perquisite of the officiating priest. The Brāhman then recited various cabalistic formulæ, supposed to be texts from the Vedas, of which neither he nor the worshippers understood a single word. When the ceremony was over, the worshippers attacked a vast mass of sweetmeats which had been purchased by a subscription of a rupee a head. The Brāhman ate as much as he could, and they finished the rest. I asked my informant, who is a small landowner in one of the hill states near Simla, what he meant by worshipping an imported ink-pot when he ought to have worshipped a country-made plough. He admitted the anomaly, but justified it by observing that after all he drew pay from the department; that the ink-pot was the emblem of the Government; and that he had left his plough in the hills. These are the lower aspects of Hinduism, survivals of magical observances which show no signs of falling into disuse.*
Sources of Animistic usages.
The Animistic usages of which we find such abundant traces in Hinduism appear, indeed, to have passed into the religion from two different sources. Some are derived from the Vedic Aryans themselves, others from the Dravidian races who have been absorbed into Hinduism. As to the first, Bergaigne has shown in his treatise on Vedic religion that the Vedic sacrifice, which is still performed by the more orthodox Hindus in various parts of India, is nothing more nor less than an imitation of certain celestial phenomena.† It is, in other words, merely sympathetic magic directed, in the first instance, to securing the material benefits of sunshine and rain in their appointed seasons. The Vedas themselves, therefore, are one source of the manifold Animistic practices which may now be traced all through popular Hinduism. They have contributed not only the imitative type of sacrifice, but also the belief, no less magical in its character, that by the force of penance and ascetic abnegation man may shake the distant seat of the gods and compel them to submit themselves to his will. It would be fruitless to attempt to distinguish the two streams of magical usage—the Vedic and the Animistic. They are of mixed parentage like the people who observe them, partly Indo-Aryan and partly Dravidian.
Pantheism.
At the other end of the scale, in the higher regions of Hinduism, the dominant idea is “what is called Pantheism, that is, the doctrine that all the countless deities, and all the great forces and operations of nature, such as the wind, the rivers, the earthquakes, the pestilences, are merely direct manifestations of the all-pervading divine energy which shows itself in numberless forms and manners.” * Of this doctrine the most eloquent and effective description is that given in the Sixth book of the Æneid (724–729)—a passage so transfused with Indian thought that it is hardly possible to doubt that its leading ideas are of Indian descent, though Virgil may have derived them from Ennius, and he again from the Pythagoreans of Magna Græcia.
Principio cælum ac terras camposque liquentis Lucentemque globum Lunæ Titaniaque astra Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet. Inde hominum pecudumque genus vitæque volantum Et quæ marmoreo fert monstra sub æquore pontus.
Here we seem at first sight to have travelled very far from the chaos of impersonal terrors that forms the stuff of which primitive religion is made. Yet it is easier to trace Pantheism to the gradual consolidation of the multifarious forces of Animism into one philosophic abstraction than to divine how a host of personal gods could have been stripped of their individual attributes and merged in a sexless and characterless world-soul. In a word, Animism seems to lead naturally to Pantheism; while the logical outcome of Polytheism is Monotheism. The former process has completed itself in India; the latter may be yet to come.
Between these extremes of practical magic at the one end and transcendental metaphysics at the other, there is room for every form of belief and practice that it is possible for the human imagination to conceive. Worship of elements, of natural features and forces, of deified men, ascetics, animals, powers of life, organs of sex, weapons, primitive implements, modern machinery; sects which enjoin the sternest forms of asceticism; sects which revel in promiscuous debauchery; sects which devote themselves to hypnotic meditation; sects which practise the most revolting form of cannibalism—all of these are included in Hinduism and each finds some order of intellect or sentiment to which it appeals. And through all this bewildering variety of creeds there is traceable the influence of a pervading pessimism, of the conviction that life, and more especially the prospect of a series of lives, is the heaviest of all burdens that can be laid upon man. The one ideal is to obtain release from the ever-turning wheel of conscious existence, and to sink individuality in the impersonal spirit of the world.
Transmigration and Karma
Pantheism in India is everywhere intimately associated with the doctrine of metempsychosis. The origin of this belief, deeply engrained as it is in all ranks of Indian society, is wholly uncertain. Professor Macdonell * tells us that “the Rig Veda contains no traces of it beyond the couple of passages in the last book which speak of the soul of a dead man as going to the waters or spirits,” and he surmises that the Aryan settlers may have received the first impulse in this direction from the aboriginal inhabitants of India. To any Indian official who has served in a district where the belief in witchcraft is prevalent, the conjecture appears a peculiarly happy one, for in the course of exercising his ordinary magisterial functions, he will have come across abundant evidence of the widespread conviction among savage people, not only that the souls of the dead may pass into animals and trees, but that living people may undergo a similar temporary transformation. But if they borrowed transmigration from the Dravidian inhabitants of India, the Indo-Aryans lent to it a moral significance of which no trace is to be found among the Animists. They supplemented the idea of transmigration by the theory of self-acting retribution which is known as Karma. According to this doctrine every action, good or evil, that a man does in the course of his life, is forthwith automatically recorded for or against him, as the case may be. There is no repentance, no forgiveness of sins, no absolution. That which is done carries with it its inevitable consequences through the long succession of lives which awaits the individual soul before it can attain the Pantheistic form of salvation, and become absorbed in the world-essence from which it originally emanated. As the wheel of existence goes on turning and man, who is bound to it, passes from one life to another, at the close of each a balance is struck which determines his condition in the life that follows. If the balance is against him, he descends to a lower grade; if it is in his favour, he moves up higher and ultimately, when the system of self-working retribution has run its course, he may attain to the final goal of the absolute extinction of individual existence. As Virgil puts it, in a phrase which has puzzled most of his commentators, “Quisque suos patimur manes.” In the light of Indian speculation the meaning of the passage becomes clear. It embodies one of the leading ideas of Karma, that man through his actions is master of his fate. But the context discloses no trace of the characteristic Indian development that destiny is worked out by means of countless transmigrations. That doctrine seems at first sight to possess a fine moral flavour, and to harmonize with the teaching of the Greek dramatist δράσαντι παθεῖν. Unfortunately for the ethical aspects of Karma, consciousness does not continue through the whole series of lives; at the close of each life a curtain of oblivion descends, and the Brāhman whose sins have degraded him to the position of an over-tasked animal has no remembrance of the high estate from which he has fallen. The philosophic sinner, therefore, may eat his oysters in comfort, and console himself with the thought that, although undoubtedly a reckoning awaits him, he will have become somebody else by the time the bill is presented.
Lucian or Karma.
Lucian, with his characteristic sense of the practical application of theological dogmas, has given a dramatic illustration of the problem touched upon above in the concluding episode of one of his most telling dialogues—The Shades at the Ferry or the Tyrant. The scene opens with Charon waiting on the shore of Acheron for the daily consignment of souls which Hermes ought to have delivered. He complains to Clotho that he has not taken a penny all day, though the boat might have made three journeys if the passengers had only been up to time. At last Hermes appears puffing and blowing, drenched in sweat, and all over dust. He apologizes for being late, and explains how he took over from Atropos 1004 souls; but when Æacus came to check them with the invoice he found one short, and made unpleasant remarks about Hermes’ thievish propensities and his talent-for practical jokes. It was then discovered that one Megapenthes, the tyrant of a small Greek city, whom his courtiers had poisoned, had managed to slip away, and Hermes, aided by the shade of a sturdy philosopher armed with a club, had a sharp race to catch him just as he was regaining the light of day. Even when recaptured and dragged down to the boat, Megapenthes still struggles for a respite. He offers Clotho ten thousand talents and two golden mixing bowls, for which he had murdered his friend Kleokritus, as a bribe to let him live till he can complete his half-finished palace, or can at least tell his wife where his great treasure is buried. When this is refused, he makes what he calls the modest request to live long enough to conquer the Persians, to exact tribute from the Lydians, and to build himself a colossal monument. Eventually he is hustled into the boat, and the cobbler Micyllus is deputed to sit on his head and keep him quiet.
While crossing the ferry, Charon collects the fares from every one except the philosopher and the cobbler, neither of whom has an obolus to his name. On landing, the ghostly company are brought before Rhadamanthus; each one is stripped to show the brands which his past sins have stamped upon his soul (surely an artistic echo of the doctrine of Karma), and the cases proceed. The philosopher Cyniscus, who helped to catch Megapenthes, appears as his prosecutor; Hermes calls on the case. The tyrant pleads guilty to a variety of murders, but denies certain other counts in the indictment. The dialogue continues:—
“Cy.—I can bring witnesses to these points too, Rhadamanthus.
Rhad.—Witnesses, eh?
Cy.—Hermes, kindly summon his Lamp and Bed. They will appear in evidence, and state what they know of his conduct.
Her.—Lamp and Bed of Megapenthes, come into court. Good, they respond to the summons.
Rhad.—Now, tell us all you know about Megapenthes. Bed, you speak first.
Bed.—All that Cyniscus said is true. But really, Mr. Rhadamanthus, I don’t quite like to speak about it; such strange things used to happen overhead.
Rhad.—Why, your unwillingness to speak is the most telling evidence of all! Lamp, now let us have yours.
Lamp.—What went on in the daytime I never saw, not being there. As for his doings at night, the less said the better. I saw some very queer things, though, monstrous queer. Many is the time I have stopped taking oil on purpose, and tried to go out. But then he used to bring me close up. It was enough to give any lamp a bad character.
Rhad.—Enough of verbal evidence. Now, just divest yourself of that purple, and we will see what you have in the way of brands. Goodness gracious, the man’s a positive network! Black and blue with them! Now, what punishment can we give him? A bath in Pyriphlegethon? The tender mercies of Cerberus, perhaps?
Cy.—No, no. Allow me,—I have a novel idea; something that will just suit him.
Rhad.—Yes? I shall be obliged to you for a suggestion.
Cy.—I fancy it is usual for departed spirits to take a draught of the water of Lethe?
Rhad.—Just so.
Cy.—Let him be the sole exception.
Rhad.—What is the idea in that?
Cy.—His earthly pomp and power for ever in his mind; his fingers ever busy * on the tale of blissful items;—’tis a heavy sentence!
Rhad.—True. Be this the tyrant’s doom. Place him in fetters at Tantalus’ side,—never to forget the things of earth." †
One is tempted to wonder whether Lucian, himself an Asiatic and a singularly detached observer of the religious ideas of his day, can have realized the dilemma which his dialogue suggests, that immortality marred by old memories would be at best but a sorry boon, while, if purged of its memories, it would not be immortality at all. Achilles, as we see him in the Odyssey striding across the mead of asphodel, is haunted by heroic discontent; had he drunk the waters of Lethe, he would have purchased harmony with his surroundings at the price of his unique personality. Arguing from the experiences duly recorded by Homer and other classical authorities, it would seem that in order to find even Elysium a tolerable abode, the shade of a departed hero ought to be furnished with a discreetly eclectic memory, which would reject all things disagreeable, and would recall only the pleasant incidents of the vista of the past. Failing this alternative, which would have savoured too frankly of the miraculous to commend itself to his critical temperament, one can imagine Lucian accepting, as a comfortable pis-aller, the Hindu solution or evasion of the problem by which the fatal gift of eternal reminiscence is bestowed only on those who have been so wise and virtuous as to have neither faults nor follies to forget.
Ancient Paganism and modern Hinduism.
Comparisons have frequently been drawn between various aspects of life under the later Roman Empire and corresponding phases of Indian society under British rule. In the domain of religion the resemblances and contrasts between the two sets of phenomena are close and striking. In both our attention is at once engaged by the bewildering multitude of deities embodying in human or animal form the visible powers of nature and the great operative principles that underlie them, birth and decay, death and regeneration, the cycle of conscious existence with its infinite variety, the lusts of the flesh, the pride of life, and the more subtle pride of ascetic renunciation. The motley crowd comprises gods who once were men, gods borrowed from strange people whose origin is a mystery, gods of hills and woods, rivers and streams, guardians of the collective life of the village, patrons of the family life that centres round the domestic hearth, kindly ancestors who watch over the destinies of their descendants, spiteful and malicious ghosts of those who came to a bad end, or were denied the appointed rites of sepulture. Of all these types of divinity there were countless instances in the Roman Empire of St. Augustine’s time as in the India of to-day. In Rome too, as in India, the higher minds had risen under the influence of philosophy to the conception of one great central power, the unknown and perhaps unknowable reality hidden behind the crowd of symbolical gods and goddesses and the manifold fantastic illusions of the world of sense. In both countries the refining instincts of philosophy manifest themselves in the efforts made to explain away myths which are felt to be wanting in the quality of edification. To the Roman with a turn for metaphysical speculation “Saturn devouring his children is intelligence returning upon itself.”* For the Hindu of similar tendencies the legend which recounts how Krishna in his riotous youth stole the clothes of certain milkmaids while they were bathing, retired with them up a tree, and made the unfortunate girls sue in person for the restitution of their garments, illustrates, in the form of a gross popular tale, the struggles of the human spirit to attain to the beatific vision of absolute truth, naked and unadorned, stripped of the material raiment that conceals her from mortal eyes. The lingam, a phallic emblem of the generative nature, believed by some to have been derived from Dravidian sources, is idealized as “the symbol of the great Pillar of Fire, which is the most characteristic manifestation of Mahadeva, the destroying element which consumes all dross but only purifies the gold.” The churning of the sea of milk with the mountain Mandara and the serpent Vasuki is an allegory expressing the modern theory of the genesis of the chemical elements.
Adaptiveness of Paganism.
Like Hinduism again, classical Paganism was surprisingly flexible and adaptive, and opened its doors with impartial hospitality to any god whose acquaintance the legionaries might have made in the course of travel or conquest. Even Julius Cæsar, whom one would credit with some critical faculty, discovers Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva among the deities of Gaul;* and in the vision of Lucius, described by Apuleius, Isis is made to reveal herself as one Adaptiveness of shape with many names worshipped in Paganism. Phrygia as Cybele the mother of the gods; in Athens as Minerva; in Cyprus as the Paphian Venus; in Crete as Diana; in Sicily as Proserpina; and at Eleusis as Ceres. The Indian system of avatars could hardly evolve a more comprehensive personality. Indeed, in this matter of borrowing other people’s gods Hinduism appears to me hardly to have gone so far as Paganism. The latter, of course, had a far greater choice of religions to borrow from as the boundaries of the Empire were gradually extended, and it may well be that the narrow formalism of the early Roman religion predisposed its votaries to embrace the more emotional beliefs of the East. Sir S. Dill finds an illustration of this in the popularity of the worship of Mithra, a solar cult adopted about 70 B.C. from certain Cilician pirates conquered by Pompey. Mithraism seems to have appealed to the Roman world by the mystical character of its ritual, by its secret ceremonies of initiation into a close guild of devotees comprising many degrees of holiness, and by its promise of purification from sin which culminated in the Taurobolium or baptism to righteousness in the blood of a slaughtered bull. Nothing could well be more foreign to the ideas of the elder generation of Romans, who looked upon religious observances as a sort of legal obligation towards the gods and discouraged as superstitio any excessive manifestation of devotion. Yet nothing brings out more clearly the innate adaptiveness of the Roman form of Paganism, which in this respect closely resembles Hinduism. It may be that Hinduism has borrowed more extensively than we know, but the foreign material has been so completely absorbed that its source can no longer be traced. This process must have been facilitated by the fact that, unlike some of the races conquered by Rome, the Dravidians themselves were anxious to adopt Hinduism, and were merged along with their tribal deities in a system which makes ample provision for both social and religious obligations.
Weaker than Hinduism in metaphysics and ethics.
On its metaphysical side Roman Paganism seems to have been hardly so well equipped as Hinduism. Apart from the dreams of a few mystics, it had behind it no definite philosophical system, no compact theory of life and destiny, such as Hinduism possesses in its doctrines of the world-soul whence all things arise and have their being, of the illusiveness of sensory phenomena, and of the cycle of retributive and purifying transmigration through which the human soul attains ultimate release by absorption into the primal essence. These ideas are not the monopoly of the learned: they are shared in great measure by the man in the street. If you talk to a fairly intelligent Hindu peasant about the paramātma, karma, māyā, mukti, and so forth, you will find, as soon as he has got over his surprise at your interest in such matters, that the terms are familiar to him, and that he has formed a rough working theory of their bearing upon his own future. The religious life of the bulk of the Roman people was passed on a lower plane. Involved in a dreary maze of trivial beliefs, petty superstitions, and minute observances, they were condemned, in the words of their own poet, “Errare atque viam palantes quærere vitæ,” without the metaphysical clue to the riddle of existence which guides the thoughtful Hindu. The road which the latter must travel may not to our eyes offer an exhilarating prospect, but at least his path is clear.
In the department of ethics Paganism was equally weak. It had no dogmatic system to regulate personal conduct, and it lacked the moral tone and discipline which Christianity introduced into the world and infused with a spirit of enthusiasm and self-sacrifice. The Emperor Julian was keenly sensible of these defects. A prominent feature of his abortive revival of Paganism was his attempt to reform the priesthood itself and to regenerate the ancient worship “by borrowing a dogmatic theology from Alexandria, an ecstatic devotion from Persia, a moral ideal from Galilee.”* Hinduism cannot be charged with indifference to moral ideals. Its sacred literature teems with pious reflexions on the vanity of human life, the glory of renunciation, the necessity of good works, the duty of sympathy with all living things, the beauty of forbearance, the hatefulness of revenge, and the power of man to determine his own fate by right conduct. It appeals both to the intellect and to the emotions, and it derives a certain measure of support from the social penalties imposed by the caste system.
Stronger in national sentiment.
In one direction only does Paganism seem to have the better of Hinduism as a national religion. Its intimate connexion with the corporate life of the community and its capacity for personifying abstract ideas enabled it to embody in the form of Roma Dea the conquering and organizing genius of the Latin race, the centuries of struggle and victory by which Rome had won the mastery of the world. Devotion to the goddess of the Imperial City was one of the strongest obstacles to the triumph of the Christian Church. Hinduism has never given rise to that sentiment of patriotism which in the last days of Rome still clung to the old gods as the symbols of the earlier régime, of the city that had lost its liberties, of the republic that had long been dead, of the Empire that was crumbling to pieces before the inroads of the barbarians. We may search in vain among the myriads of Hindu divinities for a Palladian Athena or a Capitoline Jupiter; the germs of a national cult are entirely wanting; there are no gods of cities or states; there is no nucleus of religion round which patriotic enthusiasm might rally and gather force.
Statistics of religion.
It has been shown above that no sharp line of demarcation can be drawn between Hinduism and Animism. The one shades away insensibly into the other, and the most obvious test—the employment of priests who claim to be Brāhmans—is liable in practice to be defeated by the doubt whether these Brāhmans themselves are anything more than animistic soothsayers writ large. Taking the adherents of the two cults together, they number close on 216 millions, and comprise nearly three-fourths (73.3 per cent.) of the population of India. Islam comes next with 62½ millions or 21 per cent.; Buddhism counts nearly 9½ millions or three per cent.; Christianity has a little under 3 millions or 1 per cent. During the ten years preceding the Census of 1901, the Muhammadans increased by 9 per cent. and the Christians by nearly 28 per cent.* In the case of the other two religions, the facts are obscured by uncertainty as to the figures. The general position, however, is clear. Hinduism is the dominant religion of India; in all its developments it is intimately associated with caste, and the two sets of factors, the social and the religious, can hardly be considered apart. The two rival creeds, Christianity and Islam—for Buddhism may be left out of account—avowedly reject the principle of caste, and have been affected by its influence solely through their contact with Hinduism. So long as Hinduism shows no decline from its present strength, caste will preserve its ancient reign, and nothing short of a great accession of strength to either Islam or Christianity can materially modify the social and religious future of India. Are there any signs of a tendency in this direction? Can the figures of the Census of 1901 be regarded as in any sense the forerunners of an Islamic or Christian revival which will threaten the citadel of Hinduism? Or will Hinduism hold its own in the future as it has done through the long ages of the past?
Increase of Muhammadans.
The statistics of the Census of 1901 show that during a decade of famine the Muhammadans in India increased by 9 per cent., while the population as a whole rose by only 3 per cent. No doubt these proportions were affected by the fact that the famines were most severe in those parts of the country where Muhammadans are relatively least numerous, but in the fertile and wealthy region of Eastern Bengal, which has never been touched by real famine, though people on small fixed incomes suffer from high prices, their rate of increase was 12.3 per cent. or nearly double that of the Hindus. The figures illustrating the proportion of children tell a similar tale, and indicate that in that part of India the Muhammadans are not only “more enterprising and therefore better off than their Hindu neighbours,” but also more prolific and more careful of their offspring. The reasons are not far to seek. The diet of the Muhammadans is more nourishing and more varied; they are free from the damnosa hereditas of infant marriage enforced by social ostracism; they are under no temptation to practise female infanticide; they marry their girls at a more reasonable age, and fewer females become widows while still capable of bearing children. The influence of the itinerant preachers of Islam in its original purity is fast eradicating any tendency to imitate the Hindu prohibition of widow marriage, and Muhammadan widows escape the trials and temptations which beset the Hindu woman who is so unfortunate as to lose her husband while she is still young and attractive. As is pointed out in the Census Report of 1901, “in the case of the intrigues in which widows so often indulge, the Hindu female who thus becomes enceinte resorts to abortion, while the Musalmāni welcomes the prospect of a child as means of bringing pressure upon her paramour and inducing him to marry her.”
Influence of conversion.
Conversions from Hinduism to Islam must also contribute in some degree to the relatively more rapid growth of the Muhammadan population. Here no appeal to statistics is possible, but a number of specific instances of such changes of religion were extracted by Mr. Gait, C.I.E., from the reports of Hindu and Muhammadan gentlemen in twenty-four districts and published as Appendix II. to the Bengal Census Report of 1901. The motives assigned in various cases—names and particulars are usually given—may be grouped somewhat as follows :— (1) Genuine religious conviction of the purity and simplicity of Islam, derived from study of the Muhammadan scriptures or from the preaching of the Maulavis who go round the villages. The conversion of high-caste Hindus, Brāhmans, Rājputs, Kāyasths and the like is commonly ascribed to this cause. We hear, for example, from a Hindu source, of a wealthy Kāyasth landholder of Eastern Bengal, who was suspected of holding unorthodox views, and consequently found difficulties in getting his daughter married. Indignant at what he deemed persecution, he openly embraced Islam, assumed a Muhammadan name, and testified to his zeal by sacrificing cows “in the precincts of the very building where his father had worshipped the Hindu gods.” Muhammadan society gave him a cordial welcome, and his daughter married into a high-class family.
His wife, however, refused to change her religion and went back to her own people.
(2) The growing desire on the part of the lower Hindu castes to improve their social position leads individuals among them to embrace a creed which seems to offer them a fair chance in life. Mālis, Kahārs, Goālās, Nāpits, Kāns, Beldārs and other castes of similar status furnish numerous illustrations of this tendency.
(3) The proverb “Love laughs at caste” accounts for a large number of conversions. Hindus of all ranks of society succumb to the charms of good-looking Musalmāni girls, and Muhammadans show themselves equally susceptible to the attractions of Hindu maidens. Hindu widows seek a refuge from their dreary lot in marriage with Muhammadans, while Hindu men who have been caught out in liaisons with girls of lower caste—an affair with a pretty gipsy is one of the instances cited—and find themselves socially stranded, prefer the respectability of Islam to the mixed company of some dubious Vaishnava sect. In all such cases Islam gains and Hinduism loses, for caste rules are rigid and no individual can become a Hindu. These irregular attachments sometimes give rise to embarrassing situations. A Hindu gentleman of Eastern Bengal relates how a high-caste Hindu physician saw in the course of his practice a very handsome Muhammadan girl and fell so hopelessly in love that he wanted to marry her. Her father insisted that he must turn Muhammadan, but after he had done so refused to give him the girl. Meanwhile he had of course been cast off by his own people and had become a social derelict.
(4) Causes connected with taboos on food and drink and with various caste misdemeanours have also to be taken into account. Hindus in sickness or distress are tended by Muhammadans and take food and water from their hands; the caste excommunicates them and they join the ranks of a more merciful faith.
It is needless to observe that none of these causes, nor all of them taken together, exercise an influence wide or potent enough to bring about a great Islamic revival in India. The day of conversions en masse has passed, and there are no signs of its return. Nevertheless certain tendencies are discernible which may add materially to the number of individual conversions. On the one hand, the Muhammadans may raise their standard of education, they may organize and consolidate their influence, they may establish their claim to larger representation in the Legislative Councils and in Government service, and they may thus come to play in Indian public life a part more worthy of the history and traditions of their faith. On the other hand, the spread of English education among the middle and lower ranks of Hindus may lead to a revolt against the intolerance of the higher castes, and in particular against their virtual monopoly of place and power. In Southern India whole castes have been known to become Muhammadans because the Brāhmans would not allow them to enter Hindu temples and compelled them to worship outside. It is conceivable that other castes in other parts of India will some day realize that for the low-born Hindu the shortest road to success in life, whether at the bar or in the public service, may lie through the portals of Islam.
Influence of Christianity on the low castes.
Faithful to its earliest traditions, Christianity in India has from the first devoted itself to the poor and lowly, and its most conspicuous successes have been attained among the Animists and the depressed castes on the margin of Hinduism. To the Animist haunted by a crowd of greedy and malevolent demons ever thirsting for blood, like the ghosts that flocked round Ulysses, Christianity opens a new world of love and hope. To the Pariah, the Mahār, the Dher and a host of other helots it promises release from the most searching and relentless form of social tyranny—the tyranny of caste; it offers them independence, self-respect, education, advancement, a new life in an organized and progressive society. “These people,” says Mr. Francis,* writing of the Pariahs of the South, “have little to lose by forsaking the creed of their forefathers. As long as they remain Hindus they are daily and hourly made to feel that they are of commoner clay than their neighbours. Any attempts which they may make to educate themselves or their children are actively discouraged by the classes above them: caste restrictions prevent them from quitting the toilsome, uncertain and undignified means of subsistence to which custom has condemned them, and taking to a handicraft or a trade: they are snubbed and repressed on all public occasions: are refused admission even to the temples of their gods; and can hope for no more helpful partner of their joys and sorrows than the unkempt and unhandy maiden of the pārācheri† with her very primitive notions of comfort and cleanliness.
“ But once a youth from among these people becomes Christian his whole horizon changes. He is as carefully educated as if he was a Brahman; he is put in the way of learning a trade or obtaining an appointment as a clerk; he is treated with kindness and even familiarity by missionaries who belong to the ruling race; he takes an equal part with his elders and betters in the services of the church; and in due time he can choose from among the neat-handed girls of the Mission a wife skilled in domestic matters and even endowed with some little learning. Nowadays active persecution of converts to Christianity is rare. So those who hearken to its teaching have no martyr’s crown to wear, and sheltered, as they often are, in a compound round the missionary’s bungalow, it matters little to its adherents if their neighbours look askance upon them. The remarkable growth in the numbers of the Native Christians thus largely proceeds from the natural and laudable discontent with their lot which possesses the lower classes of the Hindus, and so well do the converts, as a class, use their opportunities that the community is earning for itself a constantly improving position in the public estimation.”
Causes of its failure with the high castes.
In the face of this testimony can any one say that Christian Missions have been a failure in India? To me at any rate it seems beyond question that the Missions which have devoted themselves to the Animists and the Helots chose their field wisely and worked it well. The fruit, no doubt, has not yet been brought to perfection, but if due allowance is made for the inherited tendencies of the converts, and the conditions in which they live, those who are responsible for this branch of missionary effort in India have no reason to be ashamed of their labours. They have been guided by the spirit of the apostolic age; they have achieved much and they may yet accomplish more. There are, however, other missions which have worked on more ambitious lines and have set before themselves the ideal of converting the higher castes among the Hindus, in the hope that Christianity would filter downwards through the masses in the same way as Brahmanism, and thus would ultimately bring about the fulfilment of M. Saint Hilaire’s anticipation, “ que l’Inde finira par être Chrétienne tout entière. ” It is to these missions that my friend the Bishop of Madras refers when he says in a recent number of The Nineteenth Century that the Missionary “ attacks which have been made for the last fifty years upon positions of almost impregnable strength . . . undoubtedly have failed so far as the main purpose of Christian missions is concerned, viz. the winning of converts to faith in Christ and the building up of the Christian Church.” The Bishop ascribes this failure to the operation of two causes. “The advance of higher education,” he says, “has perceptibly increased the friction and antagonism between Europeans and Indians, and this has necessarily reacted strongly upon the attitude of educated Indians towards Christianity.” The second cause is the influence of caste. The Bishop says—“The great obstacle to the conversion of the upper ranks of society is the impenetrable barrier of caste. The social system inflicts such tremendous penalties on conversion to Christianity that a convert from the higher castes is truly a miracle.”
All this is unquestionably true, but I am not sure that it is the whole truth. The antagonism to Europeans as such is a tendency of comparatively recent growth, and I should prefer to attribute it to the shortcomings of educational methods in India rather than to regard it as a necessary consequence of higher education itself. May we not hope that this phase will pass away and that wider culture and freer social intercourse will bring with them a larger faith and will lead at any rate to wise tolerance of the small body of European fellow-workers in a common cause to whose honest if sometimes unsympathetic efforts the educated classes in India owe the position that they now occupy and the privileges that they enjoy? Intellectual self-consciousness on the one side and racial aloofness on the other are defects which time and mutual forbearance may be expected to cure. The old order of things is visibly passing away; much will depend upon the tact and discretion of the leaders of both races by whom the new order is introduced.
The Bishop rightly dwells on the essential antagonism between the spirit of caste and the spirit of Christian teaching. The enthusiasm of humanity can make no terms with the principle of hereditary taboo. Not only are there no signs of any rapprochement between the two sets of ideas, but the inducement to seek in Christianity a refuge from the tyranny of caste has of late years been sensibly weakened by the modern tendency to relax those minor restrictions relating to food, drink, and travel which weighed heavily upon the educated classes. Within certain wide limits an advanced Indian can now do pretty much what he pleases in respect of such matters, and the probability of his turning Christian in order to escape vexatious social penalties has thereby become appreciably more remote.
While admitting the validity of the reasons assigned by the Bishop for the failure of Christianity to attract the upper classes of India, I may perhaps be permitted to suggest that other and less obvious causes have contributed to the result. Caste, after all, is a fluid and variable institution which is ready enough to adapt itself to circumstances when called upon to surrender in sufficiently imperative terms. Had Christianity been presented in a form more congenial to the mystical Indian temperament, with the Logos as a humanized version of the paramātma, one can imagine that it might have stood a better chance of success. Caste certainly would not have permanently blocked its path, any more than it succeeded in arresting the progress of Islam. Why then has Hinduism, hampered as it is, at any rate to outward view, by an unedifying mythology, a grotesque Pantheon, a burdensome ritual, a corrupt priesthood, and above all by the taint of palpable idolatry, retained its sway over the higher minds to whom a simpler and purer faith might have been expected to offer irresistible attractions? The main reason seems to be that to the educated Hindu religion is largely a matter of the intellect. He demands from it not merely spiritual comfort but philosophical conviction. A religion which rests upon no metaphysical basis, and which in his view does not even attempt to solve the great problems of life, cannot expect to command his acceptance. With all its shortcomings of precept and practice, Hinduism at least has behind it a philosophy which, in spite or perhaps because of its indolent pessimism, satisfies the Eastern mind and has fascinated some of the leading intellects of the West. To despair with Goëthe and Schopenhauer is to despair in good company. In the domain of religion mere temperament counts for a good deal, and the Indian whose critical sense rejects as incredible the evidences of the Christian revelation finds no difficulty in accepting by intuition the Pantheistic dream which underlies his own philosophy. Nor does the strength of Hinduism lie only in its metaphysics. There are those who hold that the idea of karma, the theory that on each sin as it is committed there is passed a judgment from which there is no appeal, stands on a higher plane and exercises a greater moral influence than the Christian doctrines of repentance and the forgiveness of sins. The belief in a spiritual backstairs does not necessarily make for righteousness.
Nationalism and the Ārya Samāj.
These seem to be among the leading motives that tend to deter the educated Hindu from seeking in Christianity a solution of the problems with which his speculative temperament has for centuries been occupied. Of late years their strength has been greatly enhanced by the growth of the idea of an Indian nationality. Indefinite and rudimentary as this idea is, it nevertheless inspires the small body of men who are possessed by it with the strongest antipathy to anything of foreign origin that is not absolutely indispensable, whether it be a particular religion or a particular form of textile manufactures. It is a notable fact that the Hindu sectarian movement which appeals most strongly to the educated classes is bitterly opposed to Christianity, and lays itself out not merely to counteract the efforts of missionaries, but to reconvert to Hinduism high-caste men who have become Christians.
The Ārya Samāj, founded about 1875 by Dāyananda Sāraswati on the basis of the infallibility of the four Vedas, stands out at the present time as the most conspicuous movement within the vast miscellany of beliefs and superstitions which go to make up the religion of the Hindus. It may, indeed, almost be described as a nationalist development of Hinduism. Taking their stand upon the Vedas, as the divinely inspired scriptures of the Indo-Aryan race, the Āryas discover in them, by a liberal method of symbolical interpretation, not merely an ample store of moral and spiritual guidance, but “the germ of all modern knowledge including physical science.”* They seek to revive Vedic practice in the matter of marriage, and hold that a girl should on no account be married before thirteen, and would do better to wait till she is fourteen or even sixteen. Young men ought not to marry before eighteen at the earliest. Widows are allowed to marry again, and several such marriages have taken place in high-caste Ārya families. One of the primary duties of the sect is to “diffuse knowledge and dispel ignorance,” and in pursuance of this precept they have already founded a number of educational institutions, the most important of which is the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic College at Lahore.
The Samāj and the Khatris.
The Ārya movement has undoubtedly derived a great accession of force from its intimate association with the Khatris, whom Sir George Campbell described more than forty years ago as “one of the most acute, energetic, and remarkable races in India,” and as being in the Punjab “all that Maratha Brāhmans are in the Maratha country, besides engrossing the trade which the Maratha Brāhmans have not. They are not usually military in their character, but are quite capable of using the sword when necessary.” It is hardly an exaggeration to discover in the Khatris an epitome of the three twice-born castes of the traditional Hindu system. By founding the Sikh religion, and by continuing to furnish its priests, they have exercised within a sphere of some importance an influence elsewhere confined to the Brāhmans. Their record of administrative and military success as ministers to the Mughal Emperors, as governors of Multan, Peshawar, and Badakhshan, and as generals in the Sikh army, is appealed to in support of their claim to be the modern representatives of the ancient Kshatriyas; while by their activity in trade and their prominence in the ranks of the legal profession they have more than absorbed the functions of the ancient Vaisyas. A movement of this type, promoted by such influential supporters, seems to be of high promise, and may even contain the germ of a national religion. The Āryas start with a definite creed resting upon scriptures of great antiquity and high reputation; their teaching is of a bold and masculine type and is free from the limp eclecticism which has proved fatal to the Brahmo Samāj; they have had the courage to face the vital question of marriage reform; and finally, they recognize the necessity of proselytism and do not hesitate to say “those who are not with us are against us.” These are elements of strength, and the movement seems likely to gather to itself many adherents among the educated classes. Whether it will spread beyond the relatively small circle of literates seems to depend upon the reception that it meets with from the Brāhmans who cater for the spiritual needs of the masses of the people.* Seeing that the Āryas condemn offerings to idols, pilgrimages, and bathing in sacred rivers, it seems doubtful whether the priests who live by promoting these modes of propitiating the gods will regard the new movement with favour. No signs of such a tendency are at present visible. But within its own sphere of influence the movement has achieved remarkable success. It offers to the educated Hindu a comprehensive body of doctrine purporting to be derived from Indian documents and traditions, and embodying schemes of social and educational advancement without which no real national progress is possible. In this revival of Hinduism, touched by reforming zeal and animated by patriotic enthusiasm, Christianity is likely to find a formidable obstacle to its spread among the educated classes.
The future of Hinduism.
It follows from what has been already said that the supremacy of Hinduism as the characteristic religion of India is not as yet seriously threatened. The Animistic hem of the garment may, indeed, be rent off, and its fragments parted among rival faiths. But the garment itself, woven of many threads and glowing with various colours, will remain intact and will continue to satisfy the craving for spiritual raiment of a loose and elastic texture which possesses the Indian mind.
It has often been said that the advance of English education, and more especially of the teaching of physical science, will make short work of the Hindu religion, and that the rising generation of Hindus is doomed to wander without guidance in the wilderness of agnosticism. This opinion seems to lose sight of some material considerations. Science, no doubt, is a powerful solvent of mythology and tradition, and the “seas of treacle and seas of butter” over which Macaulay made merry in his famous Minute are not likely to resist its destructive influence. But the human mind is hospitable and the Indian intellect has always revelled in the subtleties of a logic which undertakes to reconcile the most manifestly contradictory propositions. Men whose social and family relations compel them to lead a double life, will find little difficulty in keeping their religious beliefs and their scientific convictions in separate mental compartments. Putting aside, however, casuistry of this kind, an inevitable feature of a period of transition, it may fairly be said, in justice to the adaptability of Hinduism, that a religion which has succeeded in absorbing Animism is not likely to strain at swallowing science. The doctrine of Karma, which in one of its aspects may be regarded as a sort of moral totalisator infallibly recording the good and bad actions of men, admits of being represented, in another aspect, as an ethical anticipation of the modern determinist doctrine that character and circumstance are the lords of life ; that the one is a matter of heredity and the other a matter of accident, and that the idea of man being master of his fate is no better than a pleasing fiction conjured up by human fantasy to flatter human egotism. Nor is this the last refuge of Hinduism. If it appeals to the intellect by its metaphysical teaching, it also touches the emotions by the beatific vision which it offers to the heart and the imagination. Sir G. Grierson * may or may not be right in holding that the doctrine of bhakti or ecstatic devotion, which has played so large a part in the later developments of Hinduism, was borrowed by Chaitanya from Christian sources. To some minds the evidence in support of this view may appear rather conjectural. But whatever may have been its origin, the idea has now taken its place among the characteristic teachings of Hinduism ; it has been absorbed in the fullest sense of the word. And a religion which rests both on philosophy and on sentiment is likely to hold its ground until the Indian temperament itself undergoes some essential change.
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Footnotes
of their books are to be had in Calcutta, so I am unable to verify the conjecture thrown out above.
The copy of Pallas’s Samlungen in the library of the Asiatic Society of Bengal appears from a note on the title page, to have been presented by the Czar of Russia in 1846. The second volume was published twenty-five years after the first, and bears the imprimatur of the St. Petersburg Censor which is wanting in the earlier volume. [Banzaroff derives Shaman from a Manchu root, and asserts that it is met with in Chinese writings of the seventh century, when North Mongolia was dominated by the Yuan-yuan, a people of Tungus-Manchu origin (J. Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. iii., 1910, p. 15.)]
[* The Evolution of the Idea of God, 1897, p. 71.]
Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 426.
W. J. Müller, Die Africanische Landschaft Fetu, Nuremberg, 1675, quoted by Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, p. 120.
[^* Introduction to the Study of Hinduism, 1893, p. 9.]
- Census Report, India, 1891, p. 158.]
[† Asiatic Studies, 1899, vol. ii., p. 288.]
^* The practice of worshipping office furniture seems to be older than I had supposed. I am indebted to the Honourable Mr. Miller, C.S.I., Member of the Viceroy’s Council, for the following quotation : " All the working classes offer sacrifices and worship on stated days to the implements through which their subsistence is obtained ; Sāhukārs and merchants to their ledgers and hoards of treasure ; and revenue servants to the Daftar, or public records, of their departments." Report on the Territories of the Rajah of Nagpore. By Richard Jenkins, Esq., Resident at the Court of the Rajah of Nagpore, 1827, p. 53. [It is described by H. H. Wilson, Essays and Lectures chiefly on the Religion of the Hindus, 1862, vol. ii., p. 187 ; W. Crooke, Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India, 2nd ed., 1896, vol. ii., p. 185 et seq.]
^† La Religion Védique, I, 125. See also Oldenberg, Die Religion Des Veda.
[* History of Sanskrit Literature, 1900, p. 115.]
- ἀναπεμπαζόμενος, “Counting over to himself on his fingers.”
† The Works of the Lucian of Samosata. Translated by H. W. and F. G. Fowler. Clarendon Press, 1906. Vol. i., pp. 244-46.
- Sir S. Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, 2nd ed., 1899, p. 104.